In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

333 22 Return to Moscow On his first full day back in Moscow, Sakharov returned to the Lebedev Institute to attend its weekly seminar on theoretical physics. If he did so in the expectation that he could resume his activities as if nothing had changed since he was last there in January 1980, he was wrong. As he entered the seminar, the scientists who were present applauded him, and during the course of it an adoring crowd waited anxiously outside for him to emerge—proof that not everyone in Moscow believed the falsehoods the Soviet press had spread about Sakharov in the years he was in Gorky.1 After a lifetime of tumultuous experiences, of soaring triumphs matched by gnawing disappointments, a part of the man wanted to avoid politics entirely and in the phrase he used in his memoirs to describe his real intentions, “to dream of science” instead.2 But his celebrity and newfound accessibility made this impossible. The lifting of restrictions on whom Sakharov could speak to prompted a steady stream of visitors to the Chkalov Street apartment he happily reoccupied. Among these was a delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that included two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance; former American ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick; former secretary of defense Harold Brown; and various other luminaries in the American foreign-policy establishment.3 However much Sakharov may have wanted to do physics, he quickly found he lacked the time for it. Although he faithfully attended the weekly seminars and periodic conferences the institute sponsored, original research was largely precluded: in the three years until his death in December 1989, he produced only one scientific paper, a postscript to an article by Zeldovich on whether it was possible to create the universe from nothing.4 In addition, in the fall of 1987 he agreed to chair the Commission on Cosmomicrophysics the Academy of Sciences had established several years earlier to coordinate research on the subject, which couples the physics of elementary particles with the cosmology of the early universe.5 But that, to Sakharov’s genuine regret, was the extent of his involvement in physics. 1. Tsukerman and Azarkh, “Liudi i vzryvy,” 124; Janouch, “My ‘Meetings’ and Encounters with Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov,” 382–83. 2. Andrei Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond: 1986 to 1989, trans. Antonina Bouis (New York, 1992), 35. 3. Ibid., 12–14. 4. Feinberg, “A Biographical Sketch,” 9; Andrei Sakharov, “Postscript to Zeldovich’s article, ‘Is it Possible to Create the Universe ‘From Nothing’?” Priroda 4 (April 1988), cited in Sakharov, Memoirs, 723. 5. Sakharov had refused an identical offer in the spring of 1987 after the incumbent in the position , Zeldovich, passed away. M. Yu. Khlopov, “They Expect a Good Program from Us,” in Drell and Kapitza, Sakharov Remembered, 227–28. 334 Meeting the Demands of Reason In May 1988 he told an interviewer, only partly tongue in cheek, that to do physics properly, without distractions, he would have to return to Gorky, where he had the solitude to concentrate on the scientific issues that interested him.6 But Sakharov was not sorry he had chosen politics over physics, and he used his newfound freedom to advance the causes he had championed as a dissident .7 For all that had transpired in his life, he was, in essence, the same man he had always been, his personal quirks and idiosyncrasies still as expressive of his intellectual independence as his political convictions were. Visitors to Sakharov ’s apartment after 1986 often encountered him wearing slippers, faded jeans, and the cowboy shirts for which he had a distinctly un-Russian weakness. With stacks of letters on the bookcase and errant kitchen tiles reattached with tape to the wall from which they had fallen, the apartment exuded the same sense of amiable chaos visitors had commented on in the late 1960s and 1970s.8 The times, however, were very different. Certainly Sakharov’s living conditions were markedly better. Upon his return from exile, the government offered him what by Soviet standards was a luxurious apartment in the building where Khariton lived, which was reserved exclusively for academicians. But Sakharov and Bonner preferred the more modest accommodations with which they were familiar, and they remained on Chkalov Street. Sakharov’s only concession to the demands he knew would now be made on him by admirers, reporters, and petitioners was to use the apartment one floor below, which...

Share